Custom application development with liferay

Liferay as a platform for custom
web applications
Henri Sora & Jouko Pirinen 12.9.2013
12.9.2013 www.ambientia.net 1

Henri Sora
© Sofia Nordström
- Ambientia
- Since 1998
- Director, Technology and Services
- Board Member & Partner
- Aucor (software)
- Board Member
- Labrox (life sciences)
- Chairman of the Board
- Father of three children
-(7 y, 4 y and ~2 y)
- Hobbies
- Hiking
- Sailing
- Kayaking
- Bicycling
Twitter: @henrisora

Jouko Pirinen
© Jouko Pirinen
- Ambientia
- Since 2005
- Senior Software Developer
- Partner
- Hobbies
- Hiking
- Fishing
- Reading
- Gym

Today,
Custom Web Applications
with Liferay

Common use cases for Liferay
Intranets
Extranets
Large scale web sites

Old Portal

Modern Portal: Application
Platform

Accelerating Application Development

The technologies for
Custom Applications

Permissions API
-
User authentication,
authorisation and permissions

Permissions API
The good
• Versatile system
• Commonly required API’s are from out of the box
• Permissions & Authentication API
• UI to handle changes to the users
• Tag library for JSP pages
• Easily modified and extendable for custom portlets
The bad
• It is a complicated system and has learning curve

Liferay’s permission data model
See, it is
quite
complex...
One day to
learn – one
year to
master

CMS Functionality
-
Page Content and editing

CMS Functionality
The good
• Flexible content structure and display definition i.e.,
Structures and Templates
• Versatile document storage (i.e. excellent API’s)
• Content versioning
• Scheduled publishing of content
• Workflow capabilities
• Articles can be integrated easily to custom portlets
The bad
• The UI a bit challenging

Editor
Good. No need to
write yet another
CMS system for my
apps

Content template

Asset Framework
-
Content aggregator for portlets

Asset Framework
The good
• Shared storage and display for various content items in the
application
• Custom portlets can be integrated to the Asset Framework
and can be published as assets
• Categories; tags; commenting; etc.
• Display styles and methods can be set based on the content
type
The bad
• Again, correct Asset Framework usage requires learning
• The Asset Publisher and other display portlets require
modification almost each time they are being used
because the OOTB setup seldom meets the project’s
requirements

www.ambientia.net12.9.2013 28
Loads of
buttons over
here...

Asset Selection
This is quite
powerful
and
dynamic.
Good.

Sites and Organisations
-
Multiple Web Sites
with
centralised management

Sites and Organisations
The good
• Staging functionality
• Private and public pages
• Can have unique domain names
• Content can be structured to sites with different rights
• Page and Site Templates enables fast structure
management and modification
The bad
• Site versus organisation selection can be tricky
• Data migrated via large lar pakages

Site pages, page details

Service Builder
-
Service Layer Generation and
Data Modelling

Service Builder
The good
• Easy data structure mapping and finder mapping with XML
• Can be finetuned with portlet-model-hints.xml
• Automatic service layer generation
• Easy extension of the default interfaces
• Permissions Framework works nicely with the Service Builder
• Multiple portlet apps can use dependencies from each other
The bad
• Automatically generated code is difficult to accept for certain
developers
• It is difficult to fix bugs in the generated code

Service.xml
WOW!
JSON for
free!

Common requirements for
enterprise web applications
-
out of the box for developers

The technologies we are
NOT
leveraging

Techologies and componets not used
1. Liferay’s CE- version
2. Most of the OOTB portlets
• Liferay has a large set of portlets included but
only a few of them are commonly used when
building custom applications
3. Struts Framework
• Commonly replaced by Spring or Liferay MVC
• On some cases needs to be used
4. Ext environment
• Is replaced by hooks in most cases

Example

Newolo - again

Newolo
• It did not require a Portal as such it benefits a lot of about
• Permissions API: user Authentication and Authorisation
• Service Builder
• UI with JSP & JSTL
• SOAP based integration with custom made content
repository
• Application architecture utilizes site structures to enhance
logic and manageability
• Themes and layouts for multiple clients
• Documents and Media to update videos to the system
• Localization for all content
• Liferay scheduling to send reminders
• Therefore, Liferay is being used in a custom application

Liferay is
good for
custom
applications
1) OOTB
Developer
Functionality
2) OOTB
Portal’s
management
interfaces
3) Portal’s
footprint is
not an issue
with modern
hardware
4) Decent
licensing
model for
single app
usage

Questions?
Twitter: @henrisora & henri.sora@ambientia.fi

Sähköposti: henri.sora@ambientia.fi
Twitter: @henrisora
Henri & Jouko

Custom application development with liferay

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